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Label:Antonello da Messina transformed the Renaissance portrait in paintings like this one, in which the face emerges from the dark background and the sitter’s steady gaze confronts the viewer. He created this composition shortly before traveling to Venice, where his work greatly influenced Giovanni Bellini (Italian, first documented 1459, died 1516), who is considered the founder of Venetian Renaissance art.

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Philadelphia Museum of Art Handbook (2014 Edition)

Antonello da Messina, whose career took him from his native Messina in Sicily to Naples and Venice, was one of the first Italian artists to adopt the Netherlandish use of oil, which gave his paint surfaces a luminosity that egg tempera, then the primary painting medium in Italy, could not achieve. This method served him particularly well in his portraits, which were considered the greatest in fifteenth-century Italy for their psychological penetration of character, as seen in this masterpiece, in which the sitter emerges from the dark background with only his face lit. Carl Brandon Strehlke, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014, p. 100.

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